[Antigenicity of drugs used in anesthesiology]

The authors studies the factors involved in the antigenicity of the principal medications used in anaesthetics, including general anaesthesia, local anaesthetics and muscle relaxants. Any attempt at establishing a correlation between the chemical properties of these medications and their haptenic power would seem difficult by virtue of the fact that the complications seen in clinical practice are characterised by their rarity. The latter may be explained either on the basis of a low haptenic power of the substances or by the fact of their administration which is rarely repeated after a short time interval. Finally, the difficulties of this correlation are even further increased by the fact that the haptenic power is not always due to the medication itself, but sometimes to one of its metabolites.